


The Temperament of Elvhen Blood

by Niconsernetta



Series: Our Slow Rising Dreams [2]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Alternate Universe - Religion Changes, Kid!Inquisitor, Kidquisitor, Mages and Templars, Magic-Users, Politics, Religion, world building
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-07
Updated: 2019-09-07
Packaged: 2020-10-11 12:28:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,968
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20546168
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Niconsernetta/pseuds/Niconsernetta
Summary: It is important to remember when dealing with the High Inquisitor of the Second Inquisition that despite appearances one is speaking to a being which is not human and never will be. While the differences between elves and humans has beenquantifiedby scholars that said differences are less apparent in those elves which had been raised with or along side human cultures. The tempering of a particular culture does not, however, invalidate the status of an elf as an elf. From their very thought processes and instincts they are fundamentally not human despite their ability to yield viable offspring with humans. On the matter of half elvhen individuals please take note of the fact that the do not always favor their human ancestry in their temperament or mentality.The Herald of Andraste is not human and while for the sake of the success of the Inquisition she takes care to appear otherwise in her dealings there is a limit to that mercurial process of thought translated into actions which are easily understood. It is very much like learning a language but never truly mastering it, having to translate each sentence and word you hear and speak into something familiar.





	The Temperament of Elvhen Blood

**Author's Note:**

> No this is not originally what I promised following [ Practical Applications of Magic ](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19119139/chapters/45433582) but after unsuccessfully seducing my muse to get something that wasn't a half fragmented idea this is what I got. We're diving into the space that Bioware has unintentionally created when they introduced races other than humans into Dragon Age. My ridiculous mind went, "Yeah Leliana/Inquisitor mother/daughter relationship but what about them elves tho?" and thus this rabbit hole of madness that I find myself in.
> 
> Forgive me if this first chapter is kind of fragmented, I wrote it over the course of two sessions and like twelve hours of beginning a paragraph, deciding I didn't like it and deleting it. The second half was written first in a moment of 0300 "Okay woman, if I do this will you let me sleep!" and the first half came later. Like the previous piece I'll let this go where it wants to go and see where it leads, eventually I'll get my shit together (I've been telling myself this for like 20 years let's see if I'll actually have anything together by twenty-six).
> 
> Shout out to [ FenxShiral](https://archiveofourown.org/users/FenxShiral/pseuds/FenxShiral) for  Project Elvhen  out here doing the Lord's work for lore junkies and people like me with a semi-abusive muse who is perpetually absent like a parent in the armed forces from like 2001-2011. Get mad at that last bit if you want to, my dad was USAF for 26 years and was in and out of the middle east from immediately following 9/11 until he retired in 2011. I know okay guys, I freaking lived it.

The last eight years had given legitimacy to the ancient prejudice against elvhen kind in places and dispelled long held beliefs founded on said prejudice in others. To say that elves simply were not human was as categorically true as saying that blue was a color but without truly defining the differences between elves and humans the statement was meaningless. A blanket statement littered with the glittering generalities that had long since divided the peoples of Thedas along lines which were secondary to the glaring fact that _us against them_ was more relevant when referring to demons and dark spawn rather than the petty race wars between qunari and dwarves and elves and humans and mages and Templars. The _us against them_ mentality was best applied when _us_ was defined as everything with the sense to look into the sky and recognize that there was a tear in reality and the _them_ was defined as everything actively trying to stop the only organization that was both equip and willing to handle said tear in reality.

None of that was to say that the fact that the Herald of Andraste was an elf was anything less than relevant in the day to day lives of those who dealt with her directly. Now less a girl and more of a woman, the differences between an elf burgeoning on maturity and a human of an age were more pronounced and somewhat less pronounced. As with everything involving elves there were more intricacies and clauses and exceptions on a spectrum of what would be considered by other elves as normal. The result was a strong argument against the effects of one’s upbringing upon their nature to a degree, particularly when one compared the Herald to Sera.

For lack of a better description of the difference Sera, for all of her quirks, was a domesticated house cat and the Herald was a mountain lion caged for the amusements of the people at a circus constantly being prodded and poked and made to put on an entertaining show.

In Josephine’s attempts to tutor the Herald in proper courtly manner befitting the station the Herald held within the Inquisition and within the Chantry, regardless of the Chantry’s repudiation of the Inquisition, the help of Solas was invaluable. Even Josephine’s governess would have been hard pressed to impress the importance of civility and moderation in very particular circumstances wherein human arrogance or pride was replaced by the rigid instinctive hierarchy of Dalish elves. Truly they were almost a breed apart from their city dwelling kin, generations of the docile temperaments meant to put the humans at ease and draw less attention to themselves as compared to generations of volatility and moonlight rituals involving more fire than a people who lived as nomads should be comfortable wielding. Dogs as compared to wolves.

As a girl the differences were easily masked, behaving in a certain manner was a game of pretend rather than the grating realities of an itchy frock around one’s neck at a party that had been in full swing for hours with no chance of it stopping any time soon. The more unusual behaviors, like the refusal to meet someone’s eye unless the conversation had devolved to open hostility or licking the blood off of a close companion or the habit of actively scenting strangers, had been easy enough to dissuade when Eirlana was younger although it was clear that it had been an uncomfortable transition. There had been set backs and pit falls along the path of training a Dalish child to be a Lady of the Courts but no one could quite say that they had failed.

Perhaps the new roadblocks were all the more alarming for their former success.

The triggers for this sudden change in behavior were subtle and varied though their source was obvious, the Herald’s body was maturing and her behavior was changing to reflect it. Mercifully they had not lost her to flights of fancy about attractive boys and dashing young men, it had been clear from the outset that Kieran would be first in her affections for a variety of reasons that only made sense to females of a certain age and those who remembered what it was like to be female of that age. There had been no worries that she would retreat into maudlin self-recrimination due to the rejection of young love when Kieran had responded in kind.

A long and painfully embarrassing conversation with Solas and one of the Iron Bull’s Chargers, Dalish, had been as enlightening as it was in many ways disheartening. They were fortunate indeed that Eirlana was well bred by standards both elvhen and human; all signs had indicated that her mother had been a gentle soul that needed a fair bit of provocation to lash out violently. It was a temperament that the Herald shared though that didn’t preclude the possibility of a violent incident, it simply meant that it would take more provocation intended or not to incite a violent incident.

Over the course of the last eight years the day to day operation of the Inquisition had changed as the Herald had grown, her opinions weighing more heavily into the final decisions made on any matter. While they hadn’t allowed her to lure a dragon back to Val Royeaux after a particularly grating obligation to Empress Celene no one had been able to find fault in her suggestion that the Iron Bull find the other Tal-Vashoth and offer them a position suitable to their skills and accomplishments. Some two hundred disgraced Qunari had come to serve the Inquisition in various ways from administration to civil engineering to soldiery. The symbolic title of High Inquisitor had taken on true meaning in the last four years and the people were looking to the Herald to determine who the next Divine should be.

Just who would sit upon the Sunburst Throne was a matter for the Chantry that the Chancellors were intent on prolonging until a consensus was drawn on the legitimacy of the Inquisition and a conclusion to the _“unfortunate issue of the Breach”_ had been found. Still the Chancellors remained focused on the title bestowed upon an unwilling child, a title which was only begrudgingly accepted on the best of days, than they were about the very real crisis that had befallen Thedas. When they weren’t moaning about the lack of clarity about her status as a saint awaiting confirmation or decrying her title of the Herald of Andraste on the basis of her being an elf they were too busy posturing for their favored candidates for Divine. It seemed that only half of them had acknowledged the importance of the Herald to the success of the Inqusition in its secondary endeavor seeing as the opening of the Breach had stalled any true attempt at reforming the Faith.

Somehow the fact that the Breach had not been closed in its entirety allowing for more rifts to appear as they would throughout Thedas had escaped nearly half of the Chanellor’s notice. The very real threat of demons arising from the Black City and the increasingly likely fact of the Maker’s displeasure in his creations was less important to the Chantry than the fact that there was an elf that the people revered and that somehow said elf was involved in the death of the Divine Justinia in ways that had yet to be truly illuminated. Just how they had come to that conclusion despite even the most zealous of the Templars having cooled their ire enough to recognize that while she possessed the power to create the Breach she wouldn’t have possibly survived the attempt as a child of eight years but could have survived the opening of the Breach by bonding with the magic which had created it was anyone’s guess.

Truly the only legitimate concerns anyone with any power to hinder the operations of the Inquisition through force or sheer political inconvenience were the Templars, who were now concerned at how powerful the young woman had become in the last eight years. In accordance with the Rite of Annulment she was an apostate who represented everything that they feared, a hedge mage of immense magical power who had been trained in the art by several less than appropriate tutors rampaging across Thedas largely unsupervised. Unfortunately the resilient stand outs of their order were not in a position where they could do much about the presence of the young woman for numerous reasons, the least of which was the fact that she had gained enough access to her font that she could quite easily just open the ground beneath the feet of any of their number fool enough to attack her and close it around them. That was the problem with powerful mages, at a certain point all one could hope to do was either poison them or wait for the effects of time to take hold if they had not been properly indoctrinated with the fear of reprisal from the Templars.

No one still resisting the efforts that the Inquisition had made to make the world a bearable place to live in instead of a nightmare where nihilism and the growing sense of dread were the only reasonable attitudes anyone could have about the world seemed keen on acknowledging several basic facts about the High Inquisitor. The first of which was that while she had a tongue as sharp as a blade in the last eight years she had refrained from murdering anyone who wasn’t actively trying to murder her first, the second was that somehow some fragment of childhood innocence had remained: the hope for a better world. That Eirlana bothered to get out of bed most days was a triumph in itself, particularly when Skyhold was entertaining guests.

The ancient citadel had been revitalized into a thriving hub of activity, where mages and Templars and soldiers and mercenaries and common folk alike bent their strengths towards one goal. There was never a moment when there wasn’t one unit or another coming or going from the front lines or returning from patrols or peacekeeping missions or missions of charity. The constant ebb and flow of people demanded more personal protection for the High Inquisitor and a degree of secrecy that had become a necessity for privacy.

What the chamber beneath the east tower floor had been constructed for had been lost to time though now it served as the meeting hall for the High Inquisitor and her lieutenants. Thirty-seven men and women of all races sat in their places around the massive round oak table polished to a gleam in the light of the torches waiting patiently as each report was given. Each had been hand selected by the High Inquisitor for their remarkable strength of character and moral compass, their mission as simple as it was impossible: oversee the reconstruction of a world torn asunder by the Blight, the Mage-Templar War, and the opening of the Breach. The Age of Dragon would be remembered as the time that the world got out of its own way, when people became generous and helped their neighbors with no expectation of reward, when the nobility saw to the needs of their people and the Chantry became the haven it had pretended to be for centuries. It would be so because the Inquisition would see to it or die to the last man in the attempt.

A mission that would be much easier of Chancellor Roderick hadn’t bullied his way into the chamber by twisting Mother Carina’s arm and insisted on making of nuisance of himself until their meeting had ended. It was no secret cabal of usurpers despite the place where they met twice each year; the chamber had merely been the largest available room that had not already had an assigned purpose and sat below the High Inquisitor’s personal quarters and adjacent to the rooms occupied by the Inquisitors when they were in residence at Skyhold.

The man was as insistent as a faithful hound, following in Eirlana’s shadow from the meeting back up the stairs into the crisp air and sunlight of the courtyard. He’d been following her for the last three days eschewing his audience with her in favor of simply trying her patience. Unfortunately for Roderick he was succeeding. For whatever reason he believed that his station within the Chantry was a blanket protection given by the Maker himself against any harm which might come his way. Three days of constant lectures on her place outside of the Chantry, that she was a heathen child of pagans, that she could never become Divine –where he’d gotten the notion that she intended to sit the Sunburst Throne or could find the time to lobby for the position she wasn’t sure but it hardly mattered- and that she would face damnation had finally come to a head.

What had stopped his advance across the snow covered courtyard at her back was obvious; the looming presence of Kieran waiting for her to join her at the afternoon meal could stop any sensible creature in its tracks. That unnerving quality he had possessed as a boy had matured until he was quite frankly terrifying when he chose to be, whatever fragment of the Old God’s soul he possessed had given him an air of danger that Eirlana chose to ignore with the blissful disinterest she had displayed as a child. It showed in his eyes, the same piercing gold as his mother’s but wild as the starving wolf. Where exactly that had come from was a mystery, the facet of him that was purely elvhen but as temperamental as Eirlana had been even-natured as a girl. It was yet another difference no one had been able to truly explain beyond vague mentions of his sire during the Blight after any tolerance for distractions had been worn away. Like sire like child.

It certainly would have been enough to stop Dorian short if he hadn’t seen Kieran grow into his manhood though it was still unnerving. Though not quite as unnerving as the moment he bore witness to Eirlana finally reaching the very edge of her considerable patience in a place which was meant to be a sanctuary from harm.

Everything stopped.

The merry band of Inquisitor’s headed to the dining hall for lunch froze as if struck dead by the sudden electrical charge in the air, the scent of ozone before a lightning storm, and the rigidity in the High Inquisitor’s spine. Each of the Inquisitors had accompanied Eirlana in the field on at least one occasion and each had seen first hand just how dangerous she could be when freed of the constrains of civility in the thick of a fight. None of their number could reasonable say that they could do much more than hold their own against her having seen the relish with which she had taken apart demons. The Herald’s eyes had become as dark and flinty as uncut emerald as she rounded to face the Chancellor was telling, the expression in them foreign to the human mind but very easily interpreted as murderous though the vocabulary in any language Dorian knew fell well short of encapsulating its totality. It was an expression that would have better suited Kieran when he was in a mood, one Dorian had seen on Bull’s face in the thick of a fight that had turned sour, and one that he never would have expected Eirlana capable of.

It was the most frigid of black murder, free from glee or hatred or anything save the simple desire to see someone die and not die well. It froze Dorian’s feet to the cobbles though everything in him wanted to take a step backwards, to make himself smaller though he dared not draw that attention to himself. It was foolish he knew, Dorian was in line to become a magister, an accomplished mage in his own right and he was shying before a girl with half his age and experience. But he’d seen what she was capable of when she put her mind to a task, just how easy it was for her to slip over the edge of what a man would consider to be reason when pressed to the extremes. There was a crater in Emprise du Lion where Suledin had once been which stood as evidence of what the High Inquisitor was capable of when she decided that she just didn’t care anymore. Chancellor hadn’t quite crossed that line but the toes of the man’s impractical boots were firmly on the other side of it.

The air seemed to grow thicker as Kieran took three quick steps to stand just behind Eirlana and for a heart stopping moment Dorian questioned whether or not this would be the spectacular end of a less than spectacular man. He had had the honor of instructing both on the finer points of the arcane as taught in Tevinter and knew from personal experience that the two were that special brand of lethal that came without a warning because it simply wasn’t necessary. Like looking at a well-honed blade in the hands of a veteran and knowing without having to test the edge that it was more than capable of doing its job. Worse still the two fed of one another’s energy in the same manner they had as children, excitement and tension and frenzy and calm growing between them as easily as breathing to the extremes of the spectrum.

But for all the joyless, passionless promise in Eirlana’s eyes Kieran’s had softened and breath came easier to Dorian. While Kieran was one to feed of the violence radiating from any companion, particularly Eirlana, he was just was willing to deescalate a situation when necessary. One of the nameless instincts that had bonded the two together, some unknowable fragment of what it meant to be elvhen and to carry elvhen blood strongly, drew the young man to touch Eirlana’s shoulder and the change that came over her was instantaneous. A change in humors so complete it was baffling but one that Dorian recognized as necessary. The quickest way, he found, to distract an elf from their intent was to confuse them, to change the energy in such a way that they were forced to carefully consider the change. While Eirlana would opt for humor to confuse Kieran and bring his energy down, Kieran had opted for something far closer to rage than anyone was comfortable with.

The ice that had been a killing rage had shifted to something more sensual at Kieran’s touch, as if that cold, depthless rage and sex bordered upon one another Eirlana’s mind. It was there plain for all to see in the High Inquisitor’s eyes before the fool of a man drew attention to himself once more. This time when emerald eyes regarded Roderick the heat in them slid to something between anger and sex –hunger. The though process was truly alien to the human mind, anathema.

It wasn’t Eirlana’s fault, but sometimes she thought more like an animal than anything human.

It was the contemplation of something that was wholly predator, one that demanded the fear and respect of even the other hunters within its territory. When Dorian had first seen it on Bull’s face he had attributed it to the Qun, a facet of whatever arcane essence they had distilled from dragons to make the Qunari, something that had made the behorned race fierce. But here was undeniable evidence written clearly upon the face of a woman he had known as a child, a woman who was nothing less than pure blooded elvhen mage that contradicted that line of thinking. Once more Dorian found himself confronted with evidence that not every story was a fabrication of a mother to convince her children to behave, that there was a kernel of truth in wives tales.

It seemed as if Grand Chancellor Roderick Asignon was not completely incapable of reading a room, the only person in the immediate vicinity which had a chance of stopping Eirlana if she decided wanted him was Kieran. For all of his experience and skill, if Eirlana put it into her mind that Dorian was a threat or an obstacle, there was very little he could do to hold to hold his own. The only chance he would have was to strike a mortal blow first and regardless of whether or not he was successful there was no doubt in his mind that Kieran would come to either aide his mate or avenge her. With or without the help of the thirty-five other men and women behind him, regardless of how the day ended among the casualties of the rampant stupidity that had allowed this situation to happen would be Roderick Asignon.

Everyone in Skyhold was standing on a very thin layer of ice.

In the end it wasn’t the shield of the station of Grand Chancellor that saved Roderick from an ignoble death at the hands of a woman he was very likely regretting he had not conspired harder to kill as a child, nor was it Kieran’s tempering hand on Eirlana’s shoulder. By whatever mercurial process translated the abstract thought and instincts of elves into actions humans could understand, tempered by almost a decade of refining school at the hands of the greatest governess any noble child could ask for, the Inquisitor smiled. It was nearly as disarming as the transition from anger to sex to hunger just moments before, a genuine smile of good cheer on the face of someone who was likely debating whether or not to bother killing you before they started taking bites just a breath before was not an easy thing to witness.

“The First Inquisition was founded by a group of like-minded individuals who rose up to defend Thedas from the dangers of magic and heretics following the First Blight. Following their alliance with the Chantry the order was divided into the Seekers of Truth and the Templar Order. As I have no designs to yield control of the largest independent army in Thedas to the Chantry or any sovereign ruler now or in the foreseeable future. I fail to see why your opinion of the Second Inquisition should play any part in the decision making process.” Eirlana’s face fell from her smile into the same tranquil neutrality with which she had murdered as many men as she had passed judgement upon or entered negotiations with.

“Despite the religious connotation of the Inquisition and the faith of many of its members, as well as the title bestowed upon me by the people of Haven and the survivors of the Conclave, I have no true power within the Chantry nor do I wish to claim power within the Chantry. To sit upon the Sunburst Throne is to live a life of not only chastity and celibacy but of emotional bereavement. None of which appeals to me. Now, au revoir.”

The dismissive hand gesture seemed to spark the statues that had been living men and women just moments before back into action, picking up their pace towards the dining hall, speaking in louder voices as if to ward off another confirmation that would not end so favorably. Dorian’s heart dropped out of his throat and he hurried to catch up to his fellow Inquisitors, passing the stock still form of Chancellor Roderick as the severity of the situation he had just passed through unscathed had finally dawned on him. It was a relief to the company when they arrived in the dining hall to find that Chancellor Roderick had not graced them with his company for lunch.


End file.
